Tag Archives: horror movies

Kevin Strange’s A Quiet Place Movie Review

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A Quiet Place is that rare modern Hollywood horror film which manages to, either by accident or by clever design, promote strong family values, tradition, and masculine ingenuity almost unapologetically.

Ostensibly a silent film, A Quiet Place tells the story of one of the last remaining families in a town ravaged by blind monsters who hunt using sound-sensitive organs built into their armored heads.

If the premise is easy to swallow, the teaser scene before the credits is even easier to relate to. The family, out on a scavenging expedition to the local supermarket is confronted with one of the most common problems families face in such circumstances: The little boy wants a toy.

Only the stakes here are much, much higher. The toy space shuttle he picks up is the battery operated kind that makes a lot of noise. If he presses the button, the family dies.

Luckily dad manages to get the shuttle away from his son before disaster strikes and here we begin to see the family dynamic solidify among an amazing strong cast of actors who must emote and tell their story with almost no dialogue between them

Writer/actor/director John Krasinski sells this moment with his son, both sternly admonishing the child for nearly getting the family killed and showing warmth and understanding while curbing the child’s disappointment before the family sets off back home.

Tragically, the boy’s older sister Regan, played by Millicent Simmonds, gives him back the toy in secret when they’re left alone in the store leading to his death a few minutes later and setting the stakes for who lives and who dies in this tense and action packed thriller as high as they come.

What follows is a tightly paced 90 minute tour de force of clever ingenuity and monster mayhem as we live several days in the life of a family that cannot make any sound, lest they be savagely eaten by monsters always lurking just out of sight.

Our story picks back up at some point in the future with mom Evelyn (Emily Blunt, Krasinski’s real life wife) in the final stages of pregnancy. It’s during this time that we learn that Rean is deaf and the whole family knows sign language, probably their reason for surviving the monster apocalypse in the first place.

We learn their routine which includes laying down powder on all of their foot paths and traveling barefoot so as to not make any sound, communicating danger by way of changing the lighting in and around the house to red to alert other family members of the presence of a monster, and the addition of a sound-proof basement designed for mom Evelyn to give birth to the new baby.

Where A Quiet Place holds most of its appeal for me, personally, is in its emphasis on the traditional family dynamic, as rare in modern Hollywood as the silent films it pays respect to. Dad is not absent, dead nor a buffoon here. He is not a flawed villain. He is crafty, protective, compassionate, a true patriarch in a world of “toxic masculinity.”

In fact, other than a few logistical issues I had with the film (such as why the creatures stick around a vast, rural area after they’ve already eaten all but seemingly 6 people) my only complaints come in the third act of the film where we see all the common trappings of Hollywood come into play.

It’s here that we see Regan’s new hearing aid turn out to be the one weakness that will stop the monsters. Of course it is. It wouldn’t be modern Hollywood if the STRONG FEMALES didn’t take up masculine roles and discard their feminine strengths in order to thwart the evil.

Dad’s ultimate sacrifice to save his children falls flat for me, but that’s just a personal preference. I was rooting for him to live the whole time. Sacrifice is part of the hero’s journey, and while I thought little Beau’s sacrifice at the beginning of the film was more than enough, I understand the need to make the stakes and the loss even stronger at the end of the film in order to satisfy mainstream audiences.

In the end, while A Quiet Place is a masterfully told horror film with amazing acting and very cool monsters, I have to take several points off for know-towing to modern feminist pop culture and ultimately ruining what up to that point had been a fantastic send-up to traditional family life. A Quiet Place gets a strong 3 out of 5 strangeheads from me. It’s a great horror flick to enjoy with the family if you’ve got kids old enough to handle suspense, gore and monster mayhem.

Kevin Strange’s Bad Movie Recommendation: Demon Wind (1990)

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Some movie covers just stick with you your whole life. For me, Demon Wind is one of the most memorable VHS covers from my childhood.

It was a big-box cover that had a hologram on the front–one of the only VHS covers from the 80s/early 90s video store era to have that gimmick. If you looked at the cover from one angle, it was just an ominous closed window, from the opposite angle, a hideous demon with sharp-clawed fingers pointed straight out at you exploded through the window. YES! Motherfucking Demon Wind!

Yet for some reason, I never rented it. As a kid, I was confused about the difference between little box and big box VHS movies when, after I tried to rent a copy of a big box version of Neon Maniacs in the late 80s, the video store clerk told me (probably in error) that the big boxes were Betamax tapes and the little boxes were VHS tapes. My house only had a VCR, so from that moment on, the big box tapes were off limits to me even though by the early 90s there were rarely Betamax tapes still stocked in mom and pop video shops.

As a consequence, I only watched this truly awful piece of crap this week, in 2018, as a 37 year old man. And maybe I’m better for it.

As any reader of this movie blog knows, I myself am not only a connoisseur of very bad movies, but made a fair amount of them myself. I say maybe I’m better off having not seen Demon Wind until now because as a seasoned veteran of schlock filmmaking and having seen hundreds if not thousands of shitty movies at this point, I can really appreciate the quirkiness of Demon Wind far more than I would have as a child of 9 or 10 (a child who already liked shitty movies, but still quite in the larval stages of shit-film fandom.)

The absolute ridiculous opening stinger featuring main character Cory’s grandparents besieged by demonic voices, the demonic possession of his grandfather complete with puss spewed from mouth that would make any fan of the Troma meltdown proud, and the utter randomness of Cory’s grandmother blowing the whole fucking house up by dropping a snow-globe being the type of scene that could never be fully appreciated by a monster-loving sprout of a child, no matter how enthusiastic.

As a seasons screenwriter and novelist, I can much more fully appreciate the jaw-dropping lunacy of not just gathering Corey’s group of friends together to visit his grandparents’s cabin so he could “work some things out” after having horrific dreams about his dead father, not just the batshit decision to then have Corey’s friend’s girlfriend’s (keep up) ex-boyfriend show up THROWING MAGIC TRICKS OUT OF A CAR but then, roughly an hour into the film, bring in ANOTHER couple only to kill them less than 5 minutes later.

A little Kevin Strange just would not have produced the same belly laughs over the first actual kill in the film coming in at the forty minute mark and said death being a little demon girl turning one of Corey’s OTHER friend’s girlfriends into a doll with bleeding eyes that then catches on fire and NO ONE CARES!

Throw in a random pair of tits on a demon just to have random tits on a demon and what you’ve got is a 1990 cash in on the Evil Dead franchise demonic-cabin-in-the-woods trope that fails in every possible aspect of delivery from characterization, plot, acting, gore, monster FX and any other storytelling device of filmmaking you can think of.

My favorite part of this movie that would have been better off never made is the climax that would make any Kevin Strange fan proud. Ya’ll know I love to get nuts in my third acts. Well Demon Wind does not disappoint, as the random generic gas station “don’t go out there or you’ll be sorry!” character actually turns out to be the big bad demon dude who sucks all the souls of the other demons inside his body to become some kind of super-shredder-esque uberdemon who then decides that his single big-body should devour Cory and his girlfriend instead of just letting the lesser demons who WERE ABOUT TO EAT THEM ANYWAY do the job.

As if super-demon wasn’t enough, Corey taps into the family tradition of spellcasting by… giving himself a giant penis head? I don’t know what the fuck he looks like. A conehead, an extra from Alien Nation? How does morphing himself into a dickhead help him defeat the bad guy? Well, naturally, it fucking doesn’t! It’s Corey’s girlfriend Elaine who suddenly levels up in her random witchdom and chants the words of the final spell that banishes gas-station-warning-dude-cum-demon-bad-ass back to hell or wherever the fuck demons are from in this terrible fucking movie!

How to rate something so awful, gang? My criteria for bad movies is always that I’ll give them a chance as long as they’re not boring and Demon Wind is far from fucking boring. I can’t give it one Strangehead because there’s seriously some new weird fucking random nonsensical thing happening in every single scene. I can’t give it five Strangeheads because it’s just so fucking stupid. So I’m going to split the difference and give this whopper a solid 3 out of 5 Strangeheads for being too stupid to like but too entertaining to hate. Watch at your own risk!

 

Kevin Strange’s Top 7 Full Moon Movies

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To say that life could be boring in the 80s and early 90s is an understatement. Kids today have all of the movies, music, video games and comic books at their fingertips, effortlessly. Their problem is actually finding the time to pay attention to any of it in any meaningful way.

For us 80s kids, though? Without the choicest new video tapes, comics or Nintendo games, life could easily be reduced to walking around in your back yard throwing sticks around for sport. No joke.

So when Friday night hit and mom handed you a 5er and told you to go ride your bike down to the video store to rent some movies for you and your kid brother? Man, that meant something!

For me, that was oftentimes the highlight of my week. School sucked. Bullies were crawling through the halls and on the walk to and from the schoolyard. Girls paid 0 attention to me. I barely had any friends. I didn’t have cable TV at home. My nights could be dreadfully tedious without a new game or movie or comic.

So when I’d ditch my bike in the parking lot of the video store, I was usually jazzed up and ready to rent some crazy monster movies. Monsters were my life. I drew pictures of monsters in my notebooks, obsessed over all the different kinds of monsters in movies and books. Hell, I wished I WAS a monster.

Nobody and I mean NOBODY put out monster movies as cool or as frequently as Full Moon Pictures. In the late 80s/early 90s it seemed like there were multiple brand new Full Moon movies every single week!

And there were series. Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 of all kinds of crazy movie series. I didn’t even bother to read the backs of the VHS boxes most of the time when a new Full Moon movie hit. I’d just snatch em up and rent the shit out of them no questions asked.

My favorite part about Full Moon flicks though, was the creator/writer/director of these schlocky creature features. He was a young looking, vaguely hip sounding dude named Charles Band and he would do these after-the-movie featurettes called Video Zone after the credits of the tapes.

In these, he would show how the gore was done, how the puppets moved and show special sneak peaks at the next few Full Moon movies YEARS before DVD special features became a thing. I credit these behind the scenes videos as one of the driving forces behind my eventual entry into the B-Movie world as a writer/director. If there was never a Full Moon, there never would have been a Hack Movies. Believe that!

Full Moon was the greatest B-movie company for 80s monster-heads and these are my favorite Full Moon flicks.

7. Demonic Toys

Demonic Toys is probably little more than a Child’s Play ripoff banking on the popularity of the first Full Moon puppet movie franchise, Puppet Master. But with inspired creature designs like Jack Attack and Baby Oopsie Daisy along with some pretty graphic kills, Demonic Toys more than makes up for its seeming lack of originality.

I particularly enjoyed the otherworldly demonic angle in this little flick and was happy to see that Full Moon went on to explore these characters further in the Dollman Vs Demonic Toys crossover flick a few years later. Tim Thomerson vs Baby Oopsie? Fuck yeah!

6. Meridian: Kiss of the Beast

Meridian is a flick I first caught on late night Skinemax TV at my dad’s house. My dad had cable so when I’d stay over there some weekends as a young teenager in the early 90s, I’d turn the sound down real low and watch all of the hard R rated soft-core fuck flicks.

Usually these flicks were just excuses to get bleach-blonde, fake tittie bitches naked for as long as legally possible and still get the flick picked up by cable. Imagine my excitement and surprise as a wee monster kid when I stumbled across a titty movie with midgets and werewolves! Score!

This is just the first of many flicks on this list filmed in gorgeous eastern European castles. Charles Band was obsessed with them in the 80s and 90s and filmed a ton of movies there. So the plot of this one is pretty similar to most. American tourists visit spooky castle then insert the rest. In this case the rest is getting fucked by a werewolf. Nuf said.

5. Subspecies

Man I love this series. Subspecies and its lead baddie Radu absolutely set the bar for gothic, baroque vampire flicks that Bram Stoker’s Dracula would later go on to perfect.

Radu is just so fucking cool looking. He takes the old school Nosferatu long, pointy fingers and corpse-colored skin and combines it with the ugliness of a vampire bat, then stuffs it all into a goth/industrial outfit complete with long black hair and leather jacket.

He talks like an 87 year old cancer patient and constantly leaks blood from his mouth while he slinks around and touches shit with his crazy pointed fingers. That is, when he’s not chopping them off and turning them into little demons.

The Subspecies flicks are atmospheric, sexy and just plain awesome and the first one is, of course, the best.

4. Ginger Dead Man 2

The Gingerdead Man series is primarily remembered as cringe-inducing low budget nonsense utilizing Charles Band’s pet monster type, the puppet, as its villain. The first film is pretty much utter dreck save for the fact that batshit crazy Gary Busey plays the voice of the titular character.

What I didn’t expect was that the sequel to this altogether forgettable tax-write-off of a film would end up having the heart of indie filmmaking at its core. It’s no secret if you’ve hung out on this website for any amount of time that I myself am an indie filmmaker specializing in low-to-no budget horror/comedy fare. So when Gingerdead Man 2 turned out to be a meta-movie about a prolific low budget filmmaker who obsesses over making shitty puppet movie after shitty puppet movie, I was hooked.

There are some speeches in this film about movie making that rival Lloyd Kaufman’s speeches in his meta-movie about a meta-movie Terror Firmer. There are also some bizarre looking puppets in this flick and some pretty decent gore. The Gingerdead Man actually kind of takes a back seat to the whacked out plot about the wheelchair kid who gets flown in to watch the puppet movie be made only to turn out to be some kind of deranged terrorist.

If you make movies yourself or love movies about making low budget movies, you’ll be surprised just how cool Gingerdead Man 2 turns out to be.

3. Puppet Master vs Demonic Toys

It took until 2004 for Charles Band’s two most famous puppet franchises to cross over. And while this ain’t no Godfather Part 2, I found Puppet Master Vs Demonic Toys to be one of the most endearing flicks in the entire Full Moon catalog thanks in part to an inspired performance by the one and only Feldmeister himself, Corey Feldman.

The plot is ridiculous and over-complicated for a movie that just needs to get evil toys to fight evil puppets as quickly as possible, but once the shit actually goes down, and Feldman’s acting along the way makes this epic crossover extremely satisfying.

Bonus point for blowing up the puppets early on and then tricking them out with cyborg body parts with which to fight the evil toy monsters. That was a nice touch. While Puppet Master VS Demonic Toys isn’t the best entry in either franchise, it’s a great send-up for life-long fans who have followed these characters since we were kids. You can definitely do worse.

2. Trancers

When you think of Full Moon Pictures, well, you think of killer puppets. But the SECOND thing you think of when you think of Full Moon Pictures is Jack Deth himself, Tim Thomerson. Tim Thomerson was the square jawed, swaggering, scene-chewing, cartoonish leading man long before Bruce Campbell strapped on the chainsaw and boom stick.

Now, Spergs will point out that the first Trancers isn’t TECHNICALLY a Full Moon movie since Charles Band was still producing movies under his dad’s banner Empire Pictures back in 1984 when the first Trancers flick was produced. But Thomerson went on to star as Jack Deth in 4 Trancers sequels (and one long unreleased Trancers short film) as well as making appearances as the titular character in the Dollman movies as well as other Full Moon movies.

Trancers is definitely a Full Moon flick, even if the logo isn’t technically on the box. Just listen to the synopsis from Wikipedia:

“Jack Deth (Tim Thomerson) is a police trooper in the year 2247 who has been hunting down Martin Whistler, a criminal mastermind who uses psychic powers to turn people into mindless “trancers” and carry out his orders. Deth can identify a tranced individual by scanning them with a special bracelet. All trancers appear as normal humans at first, but once triggered, they become savage killers with twisted features.”

If that ain’t Full Moon, I don’t know what is.

1.Puppet Master 3

Puppet Master 3 isn’t just awesome because it was the introduction of, Six Shooter the six armed puppet, one of the coolest of all of Andre Toulon’s puppets, it’s awesome because it’s genuinely a great movie.

Richard Lynch plays evil Nazi Major Kraus and is joined by a rock solid cast in what is unanimously regarded as the best movie in the puppet master series and arguably the best movie in the entire Full Moon Pictures catalog.

Puppet Master 3 is actually a prequel to parts 1 and 2 and not only introduces Six Shooter but also tells the origin story of Blade, revealing that the puppet was modeled after and contains the soul of Lynch’s Major Kraus.

If you’re in the mood for a Nazi flick with great acting and killer puppet madness, look no further than Puppet Master 3, the crème de la crème of Charles Band’s enormous B-Movie universe.